The Coward

Colin woke up naked inside a chicken coop.

His elbows and knees were bleeding from the bite of the wire mesh on the sides, the coop being less than a cubic meter in size. His ears were ringing, he could barely move or see. It was his nose that read the first words of dawning horror; by the acidic stink of the carpet sweating alcohol and dog urine in the Cornish heat, the smell of his mother’s cigarettes, of her catarrh, of his pubescent body odor on unwashed sheets and underwear, "I am home," he thought.

When his eyes finally came into focus, he saw through the metal lattice that he was in the center of a darkened bedroom—his childhood bedroom... only it was different. He couldn't fathom why. The furniture— a lopsided bed with a dirty green blanket, a scratched wooden desk, a plastic patio chair—was all there and in its place. The scruffy pink beanbag was there, as he remembered, snapping at the seams, flooding the carpet with polystyrene like hailstones. Then he realized the window was gone... just the continuation of the scuffed, damp teal wallpaper where it used to be. And the anomaly of a small CRT television on the desk—he had never had his own television growing up.

The ringing in his ears was subsiding. He could hear the muffled voices of his mother and father having an argument in the kitchen; that much came stabbing back to him with pellucid familiarity.

He jolted the cage, pushing against the sides and top as hard as he could, only cutting his palms on the wire mesh. Something hard pressed on his buttocks. He reached down and removed the object from under him: a remote control for the television. After deciding there was nothing else he could do, he pointed it at and clicked, and the TV came on.

Little Colin. Twelve years old. Dad had bought a camcorder for their first family holiday. They were supposed to go to Blackpool. Little Colin had taken the camcorder from Mum and Dad's closet and recorded a message that Colin had forgotten all about.

"This is a message for Gareth," said Little Colin. "Gareth the bully, Gareth the wuss, who thinks he's so hard, but he ain't. I've been training all summer, and when school starts, this is what I'm gonna do to your face!"

Little Colin backed away from the camera and hopped into a karate stance, then started kicking and punching the air. His hair was long and matted. His trainers were two sizes too large. He was pale and skinny, out of breath after five kicks and three punches.

He came back to the camera, wheezing and sweating, and said: "So you'd... better watch yourself... Gareth. Next time... I'll fight back."

Little Colin went to switch off the camera but hesitated. He wiped his grubby forehead and said: "My dad was in the army."

The TV went dead. Colin rubbed his face, smearing blood all over it. A series of loud thuds came from the kitchen, and his parents’ muffled voices stopped.

"Let me out!" Colin screamed. "Let me out! Let me out!"

He kicked and punched the cage with all his strength, lacerating his arms and legs on the mesh, flailing until his lungs burned.

Heavy footsteps came up the stairs. Colin remembered how many to count: "...Four... Three... Two... One."

Dad staggered in, carrying a bottle of whiskey. He went to the center of the room, steadied himself, and gazed up at the ceiling with his mouth wide open.

"Dad?" said Colin.

"Fucking windows. They disappear and they disappear."

Dad hoisted himself on top of the chicken coop. Colin looked up through the mesh at the soles of his army boots. They were all he ever wore, even ten years after discharge, always tied to the top eyelets, always polished black as a glass of Guinness.

Dad took a lightbulb from his pocket and screwed it into the fixture in the ceiling. Cold white light screeched around the room.

"Dad!"

Dad spread his feet apart and looked down.

"There you are, little coward."

"I wasn't hiding," said Colin, his bloody face sparkling ruby-red in the razor-sharp light.

Dad jumped off the coop and fell into the desk, knocking off the television, smashing it. He started to convulse with laughter.

"Oh! Oh! That's good! That's precious!"

He got off his knees and stood there for a moment with two fingers pressed to his throat. He said in an exaggeratedly solemn tone: "Do you know what I did to the people in the desert, Colin? What I did for this country. For your mother. For you."

Little Colin had heard the question many times. He had nodded or shaken his head; it had never meant a thing.

"Let me out, Dad."

Dad took a gulp of whiskey and glared at him. He stepped up to the chicken coop.

"All right."

He turned over the bottle. Colin sat up, cocked back his head, and opened his mouth.

In America during the Second World War, bourbon distilleries were converted to make fuel and penicillin. The Gulf War, some people think, was all about oil, but to Dad, it was all about water. Urinate. Rehydrate. Urinate. Rehydrate. Except for one day in Ba'athist. "The rainy day," Dad called it. But he never told Colin what happened there. Anyway, whiskey is about as far from war as a man gets—Colin knew that, and that was as good a reason as any that he drank and drank and moved his head in circles so that the whiskey washed off the blood—some of it.

The bottle emptied. He gasped and slumped back into his tired spine.

"Dad... Where's Mum?"

"In the kitchen with the dogs," replied Dad, disgust dripping from his downward gaze.

Dad wasn't an old man. His mustache was out of fashion, and he had no friends—at least, none that Colin ever met—but he bore none of the signs one might expect of a veteran: weariness, reticence, carefulness. In fact, by all accounts, he was still just a squaddie—dumb, gung-ho, and proud—by God, was he proud! Of something or things that Colin didn’t understand—but not of Colin, Colin knew.

"Cowards, all of you," said Dad, and went downstairs to get another bottle.

"This isn’t so bad," thought Colin. "I'll bleed to death, like my beanbag."

He was cut all over. He could handle death, so long as the whiskey kept flowing—it didn’t have to be a war. He was forty-three. Dad had died five years ago, so he'd heard, in a motorcycle accident. There was a woman riding pillion who had survived. Colin didn’t think it a terrible last thought to wonder who she was, what she might've given Dad before he died, and if he'd told her what happened in Ba'athist.

Little Colin had practiced karate all summer. On the first day back at school, he bumped into Gareth behind the bike sheds, where the smokers hung out.

"Dad!" he cried, as Gareth beat out his front teeth.

"Dad!" he cried.